Hacker News Reader

Good reference, maybe I'll incorporate some of that. :)

I wondered how to handle native retweeting, given that it doesn't show up as anything other than the original tweet just in a different timeline. I ended up just including "RT" as a convention, but it could probably go in as a section or something.

aprescotton Twitter-format(7)

Should certainly be added now that Twitter supports it.

aprescotton I like Gnome Shell

I actually don't even need to do this, they just enable immediately. (Version 3.6.1, if that's relevant.)

aprescotton Wikipedia Is Nearing Completion, in a Sense

It seems a little misleading to have a graph with log-y values suggesting that growth has stopped because it's reaching some kind of peak. log(number of articles) looking like log(t) means it might still be growing pretty linearly.

aprescotton The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation

I find it interesting that, at the the end of the article, the point is made that failing to find evidence in the relevant measurement doesn't necessarily indicate that we're not in a simulation, followed straight after by the remark that it is worth making so as to rule out that we're living in one. Isn't that a lot like giving a null hypothesis and suggesting we go out and prove it?

aprescotton How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

I specifically tested for this when consolidating various Gmail addresses behind an Apps account, and my fix was similar: a match on * seems to include spam.

It's slightly bizarre that the email forwarding you can configure in settings would not skip all spam checks, and not even indicate as much.

aprescotton Bitcoin's value is decentralization

The original description uses the value 12 because of the prior value of 2 hours, whereas you seem to just have N generals and no such hourly time from which to derive 12, plus this:

The existence of the 12-block chain is proof that a majority of them has participated in its creation.

Why is the existence of 12 verifications proof that a majority of N have participated?

aprescotton Bitcoin's value is decentralization

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think the specific value of 12 in this example is an error from using an original description at http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099... — the original description uses the value of 2 hours (12 * 10 minutes), whereas Paul's does not.

aprescotton Thank you Apple

Sounds like he had a bad day.

Did you read the whole thing?

It took weeks to get everything working again properly.

Because I could prove that I had paid for the software, Apple agreed to send me fresh installation disks for everything of theirs but Aperture, but that would take time. In fact, it took almost a month for the iWork DVD to arrive, which is unacceptably long. I even needed to call twice to remind them before the disks were shipped.

aprescotton Teller on theft in magic

(When Penn & Teller have famously exposed a trick, they've almost always invented a ridiculously poetic method and built the trick around it; by making their art seem more intricate than it is, they force the audience to assume that the rest of their tricks are equally complex. Penn & Teller's exposures are really part of an elaborate con.)

— The article.

aprescotton Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings

If you're putting sshd on its standard port available to the Internet, why are you allowing password-based auth?

aprescotton Show HN: SendRail - Easy P2P File Transfer From The Desktop

Unfortunately, for security reasons, browsers only give you the base of the filepath, so all you can pick up is the filename. Even if you had the full filepath, though, I don't think the format of a torrent file lets you specify the file location.

aprescotton Show HN: SendRail - Easy P2P File Transfer From The Desktop

I literally just finished something today that attempts to solve a similar problem: http://copyfile.net/

aprescotton A High Frequency Trader's Apology, Pt 2

I can think of two benefits beyond "gambling" on the price:

1. Dividends.

2. Stock buybacks.

aprescotton Make Your Email Hacker Proof

When you reach a point where you have, say, half of your backup verification codes remaining and for some reason your timezone is that far out of sync that Google Authenticator no longer works (and for some reason you can't just sync your clock), then simply generated new backup verification codes and print those out. It seems like a pretty weird assumption that your clock will go out of sync and you won't be able to even manually sync. If you can get online to reach a Google login page, why can't you get within 30 seconds of the correct time for Google Authenticator to work?

aprescotton Show HN my weekend project - Browse Netflix Watch Instant faster

Tiny suggestion: the initial description disappears because the films load so quickly. Maybe make it available on the right or somewhere else?

aprescotton A simple experiment suggests a way to encourage truthfulness

I figured it would be obvious enough from what I outlined that the yes/no answers from the tails results gives you a proportion of "yes" answers, such as, say, 20/50, which is the proportion you want. The doubling is just 20/50 = 20*2/100. But I can appreciate that maybe someone else doesn't quite see it! :)

aprescotton A simple experiment suggests a way to encourage truthfulness

Just to make this technique a bit clearer, since "subtract 50 and double" was a bit vague to me: you ask 100 people the question about illegal activity, and assume they're going to toss the coin and follow the protocol. That gives you 100 "yes" and "no" answers, of which ~50 "yes" answers are due to following the protocol and can just be ignored. The remaining yes/no answers are from the tails results and that's the data you use to get a final answer. As an illegal opiate producer in Afghanistan who answers "yes", you have plausible deniability by just saying "I got heads."

The fairness of the coin toss means the researcher asking the question doesn't need to know who got which coin result so it can be kept secret.

aprescotton #1 CSRF Is A Vulnerability In All Browsers

It's certainly true that not every browser supports CORS. But thinking about it, is logging out via a cross-domain request even that necessary in the vast majority of cases? Same-origin violation would block the POST.

Plus it has nothing to do with using JS to submit a form.

I wasn't saying you submit a form with JavaScript, but rather that the non-JavaScript way you make a POST request is through a user-submitted form, and is therefore intended by the user as opposed to some invisible, unseen operation.

aprescotton #1 CSRF Is A Vulnerability In All Browsers

Yes: "the only way [...] to get a POST to fire cross-domain [...] is through JavaScript".

The request would go against the same-origin policy, at which point CORS comes into play.

Edit: Ah, but creating a form in the DOM and submitting it via JavaScript... that one I hadn't thought of.

aprescotton #1 CSRF Is A Vulnerability In All Browsers

If Google required a POST to log out (as it should be, since logging someone out is changing the session state and therefore not a "safe" GET-able request[1]), we could fall back to CORS as protection which removes the need for a CSRF token. Since the only way (I believe) to get a POST to fire cross-domain, without explicit user interaction through, say, a regular HTML form, is through JavaScript, the browser would refuse to make the request unless the CORS headers explicitly allowed it.

Still, using <form> buttons for logging out, consistently across the entire web, would take some effort. CSRF tokens are probably less intrusive.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.1...

aprescotton Simple - An Obtvse clone written in Python

This should probably have a license added to it somewhere. Especially with those 21 forks hanging around.

aprescotton Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis

While I agree, my complaint with it is even simpler: hit refresh and you can ostensibly keep adding kudos without limit. If that's not the case, then it's a UI problem because it doesn't tell you as much. If it is the case, then it certainly removes whatever meaning it has the moment someone starts inflating the count.

aprescotton Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis

How do you edit? Directly into the textarea or do you toggle between markdown and preview?

aprescotton Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis

My guess would be that it's an attempt at making it very clear whose blog you're on, to disambiguate.

http://svbtle.com/ now has colours for each member blogger, and it looks like they all have their own left sidebar slideout thing. Additionally, their pulsing icons in the top left have an additional colour hint to them.

Edit: I think it's a little too intrusive and clashes with the overall feel of the rest of it, but that's just me!

aprescotton How Reddit ranking algorithms work

I'm an idiot, I guess. I actually understood all along. I recognised that the initial score for new submissions would be monotonically increasing, but the graph's x axis was throwing me, by making it seem as though a single story over time had its score dropping, but that's not it. If it were flipped horizontally, I think that would be more intuitive, maybe, since it might capture "these later (further-to-the-right) bars are newer stories" instead of stepping back. Or maybe not, and I'm just an idiot. :)

aprescotton How Reddit ranking algorithms work

I think I might be missing something about the effect of submission time as described. t_s is a fixed value, and the post says, "The score won't decrease as time goes by, but newer stories will get a higher score than older." So why does the graph[1] show a decreasing scoring as "submission time ago" increases with up- and down-votes fixed? t_s is fixed!

Maybe it's been too long a day. Can anyone explain?

[1]: http://amix.dk/uploads/reddit_score_time.png

aprescotton Petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note

Gordon Brown may have made an apology, but UK government recently refused to posthumously pardon Turing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/02/07/uk-de...

The argument for not pardoning is mostly reasonable, I think. It was a crime at the time, and you can't go around posthumously pardoning everyone retroactively whenever the law catches up to society a generation or two later. (Edit: I still think what they did to Turing was wrong, of course.)

aprescotton $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

Whenever submarine cables comes to my attention, the one thing I'm always curious about is what happens when they break?

This article links to another they posted[1] and they then link to Wikipedia[2], and there's some exposition given on what happens when things break, but if these things are 3 inches thick and thousands of miles long, other than burying them and having ships nearby to go out and make repairs, is there anything special that the maintainers of these cables do to safeguard against damage? Has anyone covered that in a good article somewhere that I can read?

Not only that, but while a cable is broken, are there redundant cables along the same path, or is traffic routed around the problem via some long detour? Is there a way to see the cut-off from cross-continent round-trip time graphs?

[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/96827-the-secret-world-...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#...